


(not a) tumblr savior

by fleetingeternity



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern: Still Have Powers, Canon Disabled Character, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Growing Up, Tumblr, dadneto, teenage angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-30
Updated: 2013-12-30
Packaged: 2018-01-06 15:53:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1108704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fleetingeternity/pseuds/fleetingeternity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lorna does not understand her dad. How does he think he's qualified to give fashion advice, and why is he so freaking embarassong?</p>
<p>inspired by <a href="http://trobador.tumblr.com/post/71428465171/lorna-is-tired-of-listening-to-her-dad-rant-about">this</a> tumblr prompt</p>
            </blockquote>





	(not a) tumblr savior

**Author's Note:**

> Slightly cleaned up and extended.
> 
> [theletteraesc](http://theletteraesc.tumblr.com/post/71480680631/trobador-lorna-is-tired-of-listening-to-her-dad) and [rozf](http://rozf.tumblr.com/post/71493774703/trobador-lorna-is-tired-of-listening-to-her-dad) wrote wonderfully hilarious takes of the [same tumblr prompt](http://trobador.tumblr.com/post/71428465171/lorna-is-tired-of-listening-to-her-dad-rant-about). :D
> 
> Warning for mildly offensive humor? Please let me know if I should be more specific.
> 
>  
> 
> …and I swear I saw that gif just last week, but I can't find it.
> 
> All mistakes are my own.

God, Lorna's life is so hard, you have no idea. Lorna gets that her dad's trying to be a responsible single parent and all, but he seriously needs to take a chill pill, stat. Just because her dad is a helicopter pilot by day does _not_ give him license to be a helicopter parent the rest of the time.

And _why_ does he think he's qualified to give fashion advice, again? She's sick of him complaining about socks (and leather gloves, do not get him started on leather gloves) and ties (bow or otherwise) and those damn hippies (he probably meant hipsters) and so many things she emphatically does not care about. 

Anyway, she knows about that awful, blinding cape tucked away in the back corner of his closet -- she has eyes, and it's kind of hard to miss. She has a brain, too, and can put the cape and the (equally awful) helmet and the rare newspaper clipping together to get secret vigilante superhero/supervillain -- she does not care much either way as long as he stays out of the news and off her dash. (And maybe out of jail. It's not that she cares or anything; it just might be a little inconvenient, and she's too young/pretty to run away to the circus.)

So what if her hair is green and she has mysterious metal powers that are taking forever to manifest? She just wants to be normal, god dad, would you stop that. 

No, that coin trick is not cool.

So, yeah, she probably should have predicted the rest of it.

~

Lorna was browsing tumblr, and that gif -- you know the one -- popped up on her dash. She groaned internally, because it was basically the equivalent of a bat signal for her dad.

Anything potentially embarrassing was. She'd already had to explain that yes, he was feeding her enough, no, she was not crushing on men twice her age -- that was only like half a lie, okay? They weren't _exactly_ twice her age, if you went down to the day -- and had to sit through a really awkward monologue about how he'd love her no matter who she loved with a bonus sex talk because her dad never knew when to _stop already_ for the love of --

She did not inherit his anger issues, thanks for the concern.

So it wasn't that surprising when he popped over her shoulder, like an unholy ninja guard dog or something, and sniffed disdainfully. "That suit's two sizes too large."

Lorna tried not to roll her eyes. (It was one of their deals. He'd try to be 10% less mortifying, and in return, she'd try to be 10% less sarcastic. Her dad was even keeping a spreadsheet, which totally nullified any progress he'd made, as far as she was concerned.) "I know, Dad. We all know, see the commentary there?"

Her dad totally ignored her because his fury was as single-minded as it was righteous. And hypocritical -- the only excuse for that cape and that helmet was Halloween. "And he's fumbling with the buttons."

Lorna grit her teeth. Hello, it was in the reblogs, could he not _read_?

"Why don't you start a YouTube channel or something, to show the world how it's done?" she suggested, mostly sarcastic but with a little serious mixed in. Maybe it would get him off her back, and she could objectify unfairly attractive people in peace. She was a girl with simple dreams, and screw fairytale magic rules, she could be her own fairy godmother. "Here, I'll set you up a channel. It'll take like five seconds."

Her dad looked thoughtful. Actually, he got that slightly homicidal glint in his eye.

Oh god. What did she just do?

~

So for a while, Lorna actually managed to objectify unfairly attractive people in peace. Her dad was preoccupied with his shiny new YouTube channel and bringing better sartorial choices to the masses, or whatever he was calling his rants. She didn't actually care, as long as he was less of a helicopter.

And then she recognized the person in the gif on her dash.

Look, she never thought her dad would actually get popular. He was super boring and had this weird collection of coins and kept on telling her not to join the chess club before backtracking and saying of course he supported all of her decisions. (She does not want to know the story behind the chess thing, ever, which means he'll tell her and it'll involve sex. Not between her and her dad, _gross_ , would you watch your brain?) But she was kind of glad he did get popular, because maybe his life would become marginally less sad.

That did not mean she wanted to watch him knot a tie and read comments from tumblrites who thought he was, ugh, _hot_ or something. Nope, not reading the tags. XKit guy, thanks and everything, but not this time.

Wait, there were _how many notes?_ Her life, seriously.

The phone started ringing, so she (gladly) left the horror of her dash to pick it up. Her dad was in the middle of one of his "ill-fitting suit" rants, anyway.

"Hello?" she said, expecting a telemarketer and preparing to grab her cheatsheet mostly of fake information and the personal details of her sworn enemies. (She once strung a telemarketer along for nearly half an hour before her dad slammed down the receiver, citing some paranoid BS about phone bills or radiation or something equally untrue.)

"Hi!" said a bright, chirpy voice. "Raven Darkholme, with Xavier Corp. May I speak to Mr. Lehnsherr?"

Xavier Corp rang a faint bell, but Lorna figured it was some boring company her dad once complained about. It sounded innocent-slash-professional enough.

Still, she lingered in the doorway after handing the phone to her dad. She wasn't quite ready to return to her laptop. Some things just couldn't be unseen.

Her dad, the antisocial loser, grumbled a greeting, then fell silent for a long time, presumably while Ms. Darkholme was airing a pitch. Maybe it was her imagination, or her memory playing tricks on her, but Lorna swore she saw fumes start gathering over his head.

She did not expect him to start spluttering protests and throwing the phone on the ground as if it would bite him. And _he_ told _her_ to treat things with respect?

So that was odd. But she put it out of her mind until later that night, when she checked the email attached to her dad's YouTube account. (There were hilarious messages sometimes, and it was only technically spying. It also wasn't hacking if she had the password. 'MUTANTANDPROUD,' seriously?) The fanmail was often creepy or gross; she learned early on to skip over those messages. Honestly, though, she should have noticed him getting popular -- so much for her digital stalking skills.

She would have skipped over the email promising some kind of modeling opportunity (and wasn't spam supposed to be outlawed ages ago?), but the sender read _Xavier Corp_.

Vaguely curious, she clicked it open and, no. No. Way.

Her dad was not becoming a lingerie model, ever. She would...run away first, or do something else suitably dramatic.

Because, one, she'd never live it down. Two, she'd never be able to look at her dash again.

(Three, she'd never be able to look at her _dad_ again, not that she didn't already intimately acquainted with secondhand embarrassment.)

She vaguely wanted to set her laptop on fire. Alas, the gif and the email would still exist, and she did not need to listen to her dad monologue at her about the dangers of arson. (But if she _really_ had to, he'd find a professional to teach her the delicate art of setting things on fire and conscript Mr. Drake into preventing everything from spiraling out of control. Or more out of control. Her life already was.)

Thanks, dad.

~

Lorna almost wanted to be Emma Frost when she grew up and had to do the whole "adult" thing. There were worse paths in life, she figured, like being a loser who did magic coin tricks by cheating with his mutation and used chess as a metaphor for literally everything and whose sole form of entertainment was embarrassing his beloved daughter in increasingly and extremely awkward ways.

She couldn't wait to move out. None of the adults in her life had any sense of appropriate boundaries.

No, seriously, the adults in her life were incredibly strange and dysfunctional. There was her dad, who was self-explanatory in that there was no explanation whatsoever. And then there were the Xaviers, who ran a lingerie company sideways and into the ground, rumored to be out of _boredom_. Lorna wasn't too sure if anything could explain them, really. Charles and Raven were sort of siblings? And Raven got him into the lingerie business and was one of the models? And they played freaky mind games and tried to give each other bizarre cravings at 3 a.m.? And joked about incest way, way, _way_ too often?

At least, she thought they were joking. Pretty sure. 75% sure.

She also didn't need to know that much about her dad's sex life, which would be four words she never wanted to repeat unless followed directly by "is nonexistent," end of story. Charles' control over his telepathy was apparently incredibly shitty when he drank Irish coffee, incidentally his favorite alternative to spiked tea. Better yet, he only drank the _really_ spiked kind. Of both.

(Raven told her that Charles once experimented with drugs of varying illegality, just to, quote, "see what they're like. I'm not actively trying to roofie myself," except he sort of was, since he took a rophonyl five seconds after saying otherwise. She and Raven totally bonded over shared horror of telepathy augmented or otherwise distorted by mind-altering substances.)

So Emma Frost was the closest thing to a positive role model in her life because she was mostly classy in a sleazy sort of way, and her dad should have been proud of Lorna's decision to (mostly) follow in Emma's flawless diamond footsteps. But maybe with more color, because Lorna would look super weird in all white, and she happened to like color. And maybe with less of the dubious moral code.

She really hoped Emma had heard that.

It would probably take her forever to forgive Emma for (re)introducing her dad to Charles and for the gifs that were permanently on her dash, despite how much she blacklisted and how she paid a nerd $100 to hook XKit up with a nifty regular expression that should have taken care of everything, _yet still failed_.

The story that her dad and Charles pretended didn't happen, but Raven told her anyway because she's the actual best, was that Emma drove away Xavier Corp's only male model (how were they ever in business, seriously) through sheer force of personality and thinly-veiled, possibly sexual, harassment. 

Even her dad's best ex post facto (test prep; she was taking Latin because what would be more awesome than insulting her dad in a dead language?) Spanish Inquisition routine -- which was really effective; she should know -- and Charles' extremely flexible self-imposed restrictions on telepathy, couldn't get a straight answer out of the guy.

Lorna's not judging, but maybe he was gay and Emma was…Emma.

So it's all Emma's fault, really.

Lest you forget the tragedy that was her life, some of the scarring images she still refuses to acknowledge were even used as reaction gifs, and it's pretty much impossible to blacklist those.

(Her friends were also assholes who used them on purpose. She probably needed to make new friends. Or unfollow, but Alex took that shit personally and he kind of shot lasers from his chest. God, she wanted to manifest already.)

Emma apologized by destroying her dad's seriously fugly helmet. It had some kind of connection with the hero? villain? her dad was fighting, who knew.

(Lorna did the only responsible thing and burned the not-matching cape, under Mr. Drake's icy supervision. She really should think worse of him -- Mr. Drake ratted her out to her dad afterwards, yelling something about a super suit?!?)

So those were the adults in her life.

~

The truth was, she mostly forgave her dad and Charles for being super sappy idiots a long time ago.

All it took was Charles' weirdly powerful puppy dog eyes. Except his eyes were a distraction from him fucking around in her head.

Kidding. She hoped.

(Eventually, Emma would assure her that her mind was startlingly her own. Lorna would figure there was a 50% chance that was intended as some kind of barb, maybe as gentle retribution for the graffiti that magically found its home on Emma's weird blank canvases. On a completely unrelated note, Lorna will forever and always be a proponent of the advice "if your dad is the clown/magician at your birthday and you are not five, get wasted.")

Lorna was introduced to Charles on a sunny day in the middle of a well-paved, suspiciously empty park.

The park was out of the way, making the emptiness slightly less suspicious, but she totally saw the helicopter-gang her dad wishes she never discovered flying about. Half of it followed her during her entire 40-minute drive up. There were even loop-de-loops.

Subtle, Dad.

The necessity of "well-paved" was fairly throughly explained when she saw the guy her dad was maybe-in-love with sitting in a wheelchair.

Her dad did not mention that about his possible boyfriend. She knew Charles' favorite endgame strategies and fifty thousand words for the color of his eyes and all about the gentle caress of his thoughts as he fell asleep before she had ever considered the possibility that dude was in a wheelchair.

So maybe it was kind of rude for her to loudly project ≪Holy crap, what happened?≫ at a telepath, but Charles was definitely at fault for being the kind of telepath that drank several Irish coffees in the scant hours before he'd meet his maybe-boyfriend's daughter.

Naturally, Charles thought-vomited his and her dad's epic love story in response. She understood her dad a lot better knowing that he'd been in love with the same dude for over twenty years, manifested in a crashing plane (yikes), and had been hunting the guy who nearly killed, but just gravely injured, his high school sweetheart ever since.

None of it explained why they broke up in the first place, or why her dad spent his waking hours reliving his nightmares in exchange for cold, hard cash.

She needed years of therapy as-is. She was not going to think too hard about her dad's supposedly Epic Tragic Love Story or his potentially masochistic proclivities.

~

Lorna's 99% sure that this isn't normal.

Seeing her dad and Charles glued together like an ugly plaster cast? Normal. Weird, but strangely normal.

Them crashing her bachelorette party? Decidedly less so.

(And on the subject of weddings, would her dad please hurry up and just pop the question already? She's moved out of the house and is completely self-sufficient and destroyed most of the trackers he planted in her stuff, but his poor life decisions are _still_ ruining her life. She can't handle sad and irritatingly charming telepaths drunk-dialing her at all hours of…the day. Her dad really needs to hide the liquor better. Oh, wait. Telepath.)

Next to her, Raven whispers, "It was either this or the reception."

Lorna grimaces, and stops pretending they can hold a secret conversation while Charles is around and her dad looks extra shifty. "It's going to be both, isn't it?"

With all the wisdom of a woman who probably knows Charles' mind better than her own and has grown to lovingly resent her dad's presence creeping into her life like a deeply-entrenched invasive root system, she nods.

Great, that's what Lorna was afraid of.

But in all honesty, even if her dad wasn't, well, her dad, she would have still invited him and Charles just to spice the wedding video up. (She'll cry out of wildly oscillating emotions the first fiftyish times she watches it, and _eventually_ laugh hysterically, and then dare Kitty into hacking someone's tumblr and burying poor, unsuspecting users under an avalanche of a million notes of squee. Circle of life, you know?)

So her dad and Charles crashing her bachelorette party to pretend to be lost hobos or world-weary travelers or whatever the song-and-dance of the day is? Not the worst thing.

Lorna could kind of get used to it, actually.

(Well, she could have done without the weird inanimate object and animal roleplay. She knows far too much about her dad's kinks; he could get a room or at least keep it in his pants -- he owes her that much. She should really remember to send him her therapy bill.)

Oh god, her dad's about to do his Houdini impression. With a twist: there's a shark in there with him.

And he might be wearing lingerie.


End file.
